Sunday, October 07, 2012

Two Roads Diverged in a Yellow Wood, and I, I Took the One Less Travelled By: Why I Resigned my Professorship

by EILEEN JOY

I
have written letters that are failures, but I have written few, I think, that
are lies. Trying to reach a person means asking the same question over and over
again: Is this the truth, or not? I begin this letter to you, then, in the
western tradition. If I understand it, the western tradition is: put your cards
on the table.

~Amy Hempel, “Tumble
Home”

Hope
springs eternal in the human breast;

Man
never Is, but always To be blest:

The
soul, uneasy and confin'd from home,

Rests
and expatiates in a life to come.

~Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man

Part I. Fear of
Flying

For several years now, I have been engaging in various
processes of what I am now calling de-materializing. Some of these were painful
and not exactly self-willed. For example, in 2006, I separated from a partner
with whom I had lived for about 14 years, and in fact, we continued on, in fits
and starts until 2009, and somehow managed to part as friends, even while much
that transpired between us from about 2005 to 2009 was incredibly sad,
occasionally terrifying, and heartbreaking. But in May 2006, while on a
mini-research trip at Cambridge University, I remember standing in the narrow
hallway of a B&B on a communal wall-phone talking to my partner and
realizing, this is it, we’re separating (and not because I wanted to; I did not
want that, not then), my life is now officially over, and I have nothing to
live for. Thanks to a beautiful best friend of 27+ years, I would have a place
to live in the hills of eastern Tennessee for the rest of the summer, and
indeed, she and her husband tended to me so carefully for the next 3 months, I
will likely never be able to repay the gift of their kindness. They gave me an
enchanted respite; they made me laugh; they “entertained” me; they surrounded
me with good company, elegant dinners, and several tuns of wine.

I’ve always connected my love relationships to my work; when
they are good, I can think and write and extend my affections to pretty much
everything, and I only see the light in everything, but when my primary
relationships are breaking down, I can’t think straight and I pretty much shut
down. Everything goes black. It did not help that, at the same time that my
partner was effectively breaking up with me, that my stint at Cambridge was not
going so well. I had chosen Old English as my primary research specialty
(having finished my PhD in Nov. 2001), and at the time, whether just imagined in
my own head or not, I felt like this: “Wow, everyone in Old English studies,
with 1 or 2 exceptions, really hates me.” A less self-absorbed (but still
personal) version of this might have been, “Old English studies is never going
to accept the kind of work I want to do, and maybe I should stop striving so
hard to be a part of a field that isn’t welcoming the approaches I am trying to
devise. Maybe I should just go away. Maybe medieval studies, and even academia,
isn’t for me at all.” BABEL was partly founded, in 2004, out of the collective depression of 5 women -- myself, Betsy McCormick, Mary Ramsey, Myra Seaman, and Kimberly Bell -- who just weren't sure anyone would ever pay any attention to us because we had no (or not much) institutional privilege, and maybe we should just do whatever the hell we wanted, anyway. Plus, we wanted to have some fun at conferences that struck us as stultifyingly boring. In addition, I had resigned my job at Southern Illinois
University Edwardsville in May 2005 in order to accept a job at my partner’s
university in South Carolina [with the hope of repairing our broken relationship], and now, in May 2006, after a brutal bid to
re-apply and ultimately win back my job at SIUE [which only happened because a
courageous department Chair, Charles Berger, overruled the hiring and department's executive committees to
re-hire me, and let it be said, now, finally, and in public, what a debt I owe
to him and others at SIUE who wanted me back, despite the “weirdness” of my having left to begin with], I was facing a scary and uncertain future.

In the midst of all this, while spending many days in Caffè
Nero in Cambridge, when I should have been in the stacks at the Cambridge University
Library, or in the manuscripts room at Corpus Christi Library, avoiding the
work I was supposed to be doing on Anglo-Saxon law codes, I started reading and
commenting at this “new” blog called In
The Middle, which a friend (Betsy McCormick, who, like my friend in
Tennessee, helped me so tremendously through this difficult time) had
recommended I read (she also was one of the first promoters/early adopters of Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog, at a time
when many people thought blogs in general were a waste of time and the Chaucer
blog a pleasing trifle, but nothing “serious”). In short, during what was
probably one of the most harrowing times of my personal life (exacerbated as
well by the fact that my partner and I had adopted a daughter in 2000, 9 years old
at the time, who was going through horrendous emotional problems and also
engaging in illegal and self-harming activities that threatened to literally
send all three of us into mental hospitals and also prisons: indeed, our family
therapist actually recommended our separation and wanted the 3 of us far away
from each other for that summer in 2006), I found, through Jeffrey and the
commentariat he was building at ITM, a community, perhaps even a new family. I
changed my mind about leaving academia, and something else extraordinary
happened that same month: I wasn’t afraid to fly anymore.

You see, I grew up in a family that was always flying
somewhere and I had always loved being in airplanes [having taken my first trip
at 15 months of age to go to Ireland, which is where my mother grew up and
where her family still lives]; my father, who worked for the government in DC
[making a modest salary], never bought us a second car, never bought us a color
TV, and really never bought us gadgets or shiny things of any kind, because he
sank whatever capital he had into travel. He told us that travel would bring us
riches we could never imagine and he was banking everything he had on that
[plus his immense library of first-editions of poetry and his immense collection
of ancient coins, which basically bankrupted the family as well]. But for some odd reason, after traveling to Denver in 1988
[or 1989?] to visit my younger brother, who was distraught at the time and
having a sort of life-crisis and had asked me to visit him, and because of some
experiences he and I had together in Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming,
Canyonlands National Park in Utah, and also in an isolated place that I can
only recall as having been 80 miles outside of Moab, Utah, I flew back home
[Richmond, Virginia at the time] a suddenly fearful person when it came to flying.
I was petrified, scared, and so jumpy on the plane ride home that one flight
attendant threatened to sedate me forcibly. From that day, until my trip back
home from Cambridge in May 2006 (so, for 18 years!), I was so afraid to fly
that I would take every measure imaginable to avoid being on a plane. I would
even get off of planes before the cabin door was shut, forfeiting my seat and
the non-refundable money I paid for it, thereby driving some of my traveling
companions crazy with frustration at me. I would purposefully miss connecting
flights and rent cars to drive hundreds of miles instead of flying to my
so-called final destinations. When I did get on a plane, it was only with the
help of valium and Jack Daniels. 3-5 days before every flight [some to amazing
places, like Corfu, where my parents generously hosted me in 1992 in a
peach-colored villa in Barbati overlooking the Ionian Sea, as a gift for
completing my MFA degree], I would not be able to sleep, seized by nightmares
of crashing planes and internal physical stress that was so severe that I would
throw up for days prior to getting on planes. I had so many talismans for
flying [from special wrist-bands to lucky coins to lucky watches to lucky
scarves . . . you see how this goes?], I was a walking gypsy caravan [no
offense to real gypsies, to whom I might even be related on my mother’s side].

But in June 2006, leaving Cambridge by way of Heathrow
Airport, knowing my relationship was over [well, it would go on for 3 more
years, but still . . .], everyone in the airport looked different to me. I
can’t explain it; there is actually NO rational explanation. I just looked at
everyone coming and going and thought to myself: what a marvelous place an
airport is. What an opportunity for losing oneself, for fleeting contact with
Otherness, what a portal for . . . going somewhere, everyone here seems
genuinely happy [with some exceptions] to be going somewhere, but also to be arriving
somewhere. An airport, I realized, is a special site of open horizons, of
open possibilities, of hopeful expectations, of starting over, of the world
being scrubbed clean as you soar above the clouds. I suddenly realized: I want
to go places. I want to feel more free than I have in a long time. I
want to stop being so scared all the time. For the first time in my life, all
of the anxieties, jealousies, stresses, self-loathings, fears, and other
negative emotions often attendant upon thinking I can’t live without one other particular person in my life, without
whom I am nothing, just fell away from me, like so many pieces of discarded
clothing. Yes, I am still insecure about so many things [aren’t we all? isn’t
that human?], and no one’s love life isn’t messy and occasionally striated by
selfish anxieties and the need for this thing called “control,” but it was
like, well . . . it was like being born again. I had this thought: we think so
much, especially in Western-inflected intellectual contexts, about death.
Everything is so post-mortem. Why don’t we think more about being born, about
natality? I realized, too, on some perhaps deeper [and unconscious level] that
I no longer had to confine my love to only one object, to only one person. The
entire world could be my theater of love, my art gallery, and that filled me
with joy. I could be what is called “happy-go-lucky” now. I wouldn’t read this
until much later, but Sara Ahmed summed up for me in The Promise of Happiness something of what I was feeling that day,
that

The happy-go-lucky character might
seem unweighed by duty and responsibility; she might seem light as a feather.
She might seem careless and carefree. But freedom from care is also freedom to
care, to respond to the world, to what comes up, without defending oneself or
one’s happiness against what comes up. . . . To be full of hap is to make
happen. A politics of the hap is about opening up possibilities for being in
other ways, of being perhaps. . . . A politics of the hap might embrace what
happens, but it also works toward a world in which things can happen in
alternative ways. To make hap is to make a world. [p. 222]

What comes up. What happens. This is what I live for now, I
told myself, sitting in the terminal at Heathrow. If anything can happen, then
I have something to live for. I was filled with excitement. I love to fly now,
to rise above the clouds, to lean with the sudden turn of the plane to the
right, or the left, to “get high,” to marvel at the beauty of the miniature
earth and all of it inhabitants, its geographies, its different cities, its different
moods. Hello, world. You look beautiful to me. Can I buy you a drink?

II. And Now Here We
Are

As they say in the movies, or in novels: and then several
years went by. Or, six years later. .
. . So much has happened [insert here: BABEL Working Group]. I also came into
contact, thanks primarily to Jeffrey’s [and now our] blog, with friends and thinkers whose reading recommendations
literally changed my life. Here, I must especially personally thank Jeffrey
himself, Michael O’Rourke, Noreen Giffney, Mary Kate Hurley, Karl Steel, Betsy
McCormick, and Nicola Masciandaro. There are others, of course [many others,
too many to number]: it’s just that, from 2006 through 2009, these persons
especially helped me to re-shape so much of my thinking about what I wanted to
do with my life simply by saying, “hey, read THIS” or "look at THIS." But it must be said: anyone
and everyone who has ever commented at In The Middle from 2006 until now has,
no lie, helped me to profoundly rewire and transform my life. If it is possible
to crowd-source one’s life, and I think it is, especially one’s professional
life, then I can only say, it happened to
me. And here it also must be said, as Arthur Bahr said of Jeffrey when he introduced his and Lindy Elkins-Tanton's plenary session at BABEL's meeting in Boston 2 weeks ago, that Jeffrey Cohen has helped to model a new sort of scholarly life, one in which more open, processural, and even silly modes of "contact" and "dissemination" have helped so many of us to rewire our lives and work, and which have also created new opportunities even for association, affiliation, and dare I say it, employment [not in terms of positions, but for work: writing, publishing, discourse, etc.]. I also must say here that my growing friendship with Myra Seaman [begun
at a chance meeting at a reception at a Southeastern Medieval Association meeting in Asheville, NC many
years ago and re-ignited at a restaurant in New Orleans at yet another SEMA
meeting], who never hesitated to say “okay, what do you need me to do?” to any
hare-brained scheme I devised, allowed me to let folly -- quite literally -- dictate
the course of my so-called “career,” whatever the hell that means. I also met
Anna Klosowska, now my partner, who should likely receive some sort of lifetime
achievement award for “best girlfriend ever in the history of humankind.” Her
girlfriend methodology seems to be something like this, “let my beloveds be who
they are, whether children, husbands, girlfriends, family, friends, or other
creatures, and I will simply set my glow-lamp in that direction.” We are not
often blessed with such friends, or such lovers.

But I mentioned at the outset of this letter -- for this is
really a letter -- that I have been engaging for several years now in various
processes of de-materialization, and while the first act of this play was quite
a painful [and not entirely welcome] “letting go” of the idea that I would
define my life in direct relation to whether or not one “special” other person
loved me, or did not love me, the ensuing acts of de-materialization have been
happily pursued by me. I paid off and/or negotiated downward, from 2006 to
2011, $58,000 worth of consumer debt. I sold my
house in Saint Louis at a terrific loss, losing all of my original cash
investment (substantial) and said “hahahahahaha!” to that loss. I will be moving
everything in that house, which I actually have not lived in since my
sabbatical 2 years ago, into some sort of storage facility this winter.

When I occasionally reflect on what is there -- for example,
an urn containing the ashes of 2 cats, Tom and Huck, discovered by my daughter
and I cowering behind a tombstone in a cemetery in South Carolina, and who both
died suddenly and tragically at 3 years of age while I was compiling my dossier
for tenure and promotion at SIUE; a framed photograph of my beloved sister from
when she lived in the Central African Republic in the early 1990s;
first editions of Beowulf spanning
100 yearsbequeathed to me by my
father; a photo album recording my first trip to Paris with my previous partner
and her parents in 1999; an original Maxfield Parrish print of Griselda; an old
desk that I stole from a 19th-century schoolhouse in Virginia and at
which I conducted my entire PhD degree; my library of gardening books from when
I worked as a landscape designer (1996-1999); a full collection of Waterford
crystal glasses from my mother; a napkin dispenser I stole from Café du Monde
in New Orleans [can you tell I’m a bit of a thief, yet?]; I could go on, but .
. . . -- my heart actually feels sick at the thought of leaving these things
behind, of not having them arranged all around me as a comforting backdrop to
my work and personal life. As if someone
died. And this is not to mention the gardens I designed and planted and had
to leave behind, the rare plants I snagged from plant explorers like J.C.
Raulston and planted around telephone poles and in various beds in different
cities, etc. But I also know that letting them go lightens my baggage. Things
matter, of course, but they are also . . . just things. If we have to let everything
go when we die, then, can we not let them go now? What might happen as a
result? Can we enlarge the ambit of our affections, beyond our narrow houses
and the persons and things enclosed therein? It’s awfully hard, but I want to
try. It might have something to do with being “alive,” in the fullest sense of
the term. It might also have something to do with practicing generosity in ways we have not yet
imagined: what are we capable of giving away? What new relationships might
result? What thicknesses of experience might come rushing into our lives,
whether painful or more joyful?

Speaking of which, over the past 3 years I have found myself
more and more comfortable with a lifestyle in which I don’t really have a
permanent home [although, of course, Anna’s house in Cincinnati is my
primary residence, but I am often away traveling elsewhere, and she “leaves the
light, and the glow, on,” so to speak], and in which I sleep on a lot of
couches and the beds of friends’ houses and apartments, even when I am teaching
at SIUE. I am embracing the practice of hotel theory, and over the past 2
years, especially, I have learned to go anywhere, whether for 2 days or 2
months, with the smallest possible suitcase and one backpack. More and more,
and little by little, I am embracing this itinerant and vagabond life, one in
which I never forget these lines from one of my favorite meditations by John
Donne,

no man is an island, entire of
itself; every man is a part of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be
washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as if the manor of thy friend’s or thine own were; any man’s death
diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to
know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

By which he meant, when you hear the church bells ringing
for someone’s, maybe a stranger’s, funeral, remember: that is you. That is
all of us. Or as Sean Penn’s character says in voiceover in Terence Malick’s
film The Thin Red Line, after Pvt.
Witt’s (played by Jim Caveziel) tragic death, “If I never meet you in this
life, let me feel the lack of it.”

Let me feel the lack of it. Lack, I really believe, defines
so much of our lives. As in, all the times we believe we haven’t received what
we feel we have deserved, whether in love or work. Isn’t the university rife
with such feelings of lack, such piercing envy of what others have, of what we
don’t have? Such dissatisfaction -- much of it, I have to say, justly felt. Not just envy, but actual
and sincere disappointment over all of the ways in which the so-called life of
the university (or, mind) has devolved to filling out self-assessment protocols
for administrators who don’t value all of our disciplines equally, working
without merit pay, not having one’s research agenda supported, facing a
contraction of opportunities for publishing one’s work as well as state
legislatures who have perversely decided many of us are actually goofing off
“in here,” dealing with new online teaching initiatives that might actually be
aimed at our eventual elimination (or, at the least, the contraction of
faculty), facing students who, increasingly and understandably, come to class
weighed down with severe economic burdens and higher and higher levels of
anomie that make it difficult for them to embrace what might be called the
wayward paths of knowledge as well as this thing called a “learning community.” Not
to mention the increasing numbers of people cut off from access to higher
education altogether (because of its untenably escalating costs), the numbers
of college graduates who can’t find jobs, and the post-graduate students who
likely will find no regular foothold in the university to which they have
dedicated all of their studies. How did it come to this?

It’s not this way everywhere, of course, and different
colleges and even departments and programs in some places might be modeling much more successful learning
communities and administrative structures, and there are many moments where we
are enjoying our work and our scholarly communities (at home, away, etc.), but
we might say that the larger picture of the university (here and abroad) has
gotten bleaker: funding is decreasing at the exact same moment that
intellectual life itself seems to be under attack. All of a sudden, especially
in America, being stupid (or willfully ignorant), and also being stupendously
selfish and anti-“Great Society,” is not only okay; it might even decide the
fate of elections. All across America I feel as if I can actually hear the
hardening of hearts, the locks being closed on the vaults of money moldering
away in private accounts, and minds refusing to be open to the surprise of
learning, or encountering, something “new.” The private, and privation, is
winning out over the public and the open. Horizons are shrinking, and with
them, our potential to be something other than what we are, to become-Other, to
care better for this world and all of it inhabitants, human and nonhuman,
animate and inanimate, and to embrace Auden’s dictum, from his poem “September
1, 1939,” “we must love one another or die” [and sure, we need to theorize love
in really smart ways that recognize simply “loving” each other is not enough,
and may even be harmful and deforming, and furthermore, love itself might have
to be re-envisioned as non-selfish and non-self-serving acts of making room for
alterity, and please, we can discuss this at length, and have, and will].

In the university as well, under pressures from the
so-called outside [economic, ideological, cultural, etc.], we have somewhat
turned against each other, or have been forced to make aggressive decisions:
which disciplines are more useful, more practical, more valuable, than others? Which
programs might we cut? How shall we make various humanities programs more
application- and skills-based or more in conversation with other disciplines,
and so on? We don’t want to be Luddites ducking every time a new technology or
idea comes along that might help us to improve and re-envision in powerful ways
our curricula, but at the same time, it doesn’t feel any more as if everyone
within the university is working within a framework of solidarity. We need
productive dissensus, but we also need a framework of solidarity, and that has
been seriously eroded. We do not have solidarity.

Coming home last week after BABEL’s biennial meeting in
Boston, or rather, parking myself in Saint Louis at my dear friend Valerie
Vogrin’s apartment [which is also home] for a couple of days before departing
again for Milwaukee and then Buffalo, I shed another skin. Similar to that
moment in Heathrow airport in June 2006 when I felt as if parts of me were
falling away and the world cracking open before my eyes, I knew what I would
do, possessed of what Jonathan Hsy, under the sway of BABEL’s meeting in Boston
but also of a recent talk by Jack Halberstam at GWU, has said must be our
willingness “to think more creatively across languages, cultures, times,
[to] engage in high theory and low theory, and go
gaga on the university itself.” Further, Jonathan wrote, and it is worth
repeating here, that we might engage new forms of

“co-disciplinarity”
-- a being-together and becoming-together in, through, and among varied modes
of knowledge and different cultural/social orientations towards the world.
While it's easy to view this image as naively utopian, the light and dark
portions of this panoramic vision . . . could suggest a range of unanticipated
effects that result from radical modes of becoming-together: yes, there are the
positive resonances of “co-disciplinarity” (collaboration, progress, pleasure,
belonging), but we might also think about its unintended negative effects too
(a broad sense of threat, vulnerability and “co-dependency,” jealously,
failure, or persisting exclusions).

What I find so nice
about coming-together-across-disciplines via the “co” (rather than “inter-“ or
“multi-“ or even “trans-“) is the idea of simultaneity and concurrence as
well the term's unintended resonances and connotations. If co-disciplinarity
suggests “co-dependency,” so be it: we might be well served to think about
striving among disciplines as a form of collective caregiving, attention
to many modes of experience, and enabling forms of collective change.
Co-disciplinarity -- to gesture towards disability studies -- might be a mode
of articulation for disciplinary orientations with nonstandard bodies; as
Eileen states in a Facebook status relating a dream she had post-BABEL,
we might “create a new university as a work of
art.. . . . developing new embodied social practices . . . and the citizenship
model would be global and nomadic.”

. . . .

. . . we can also
thrive and strive through the pleasures of an open confraternity:
reinventing medieval models, we can reconfigure ourselves into a fully
inclusive community that encourages acts of scholarly mercy, fosters
earnest engagement in the world, and enacts mutual care. Whether or not a newly
configured (in)corporation can ever be achieved, let us at least try,
even if things don't work out. Let us boldly fail where no one has failed
before.

Yes, Jonathan, yes yes yes. Let’s try
that.

For me, that means resigning my
“regular” job, which I did last Wednesday, with NO OTHER specific job in the
offing, no specific place I might, or could land. For now. I am not saying we
all have to leave the university now to start a new university, but what I am
saying is that, for me, the pace of change within the university is too slow
for me, I am getting older, and there is much to do, and much to see. You see,
I would like to dream a new university into being [I don’t know how . . . yet],
and for now, I just know that I need to spend all of my energies on running the
BABEL Working Group and punctum books full-time, with or without an
institutional salary. And I want to hang out more with folk like those with the Urmadic University, to see what wisdom I might soak up from others also pursuing radically new educational initiatives. You see, this actually has something to do with the
confraternity Jonathan mentions in his post. Starting today, I work on behalf
of this confraternity, with all of its attendant positive and negative effects,
in order to foster a more collective “earnest engagement with the world” and
“mutual care” and to also enlarge the chances of more persons having the their
voices and thoughts heard and felt in a more radically open and global intellectual
commons. We, or I, might fail. But it will be a beautiful failure, a grand love
affair. And this has something to do with happiness as well: not happiness as
things we get, or goals we accomplish, but happiness as activity, as that thing
that never arrives that, nevertheless, we labor on behalf of. Happiness as
work, the work we undertake together to leave knowledge permanently unsettled
-- the work of Derrida’s university without condition, and Bill Readings’
university in ruins. To take our theories seriously. To live them. With some hap, and like the misfits in Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, we'll make a world together.

41 comments:

What a brave and beautiful action. I think that you are enacting what fears holds many back from, and rejecting lip service as no more than that. It's poetry in life and deserves the deepest admiration.

So much to admire -- and be inspired by -- here. I like how your account of resignations is also an account of the sustaining power of friendship, with all the mixed emotions that come from being closely bonded by people who sustain (as well as those who hold back). A different version of the same story would be a listing of the people, places and institutions left behind -- so I like, too, that this is a carrying forth rather than a moving onwards. More later, but this is a quick thought before departing for the day.

After a weekend of writing Emerson poems, I must say you're my new favorite Transcendentalist. You're proof that Self-Reliance is an argument about love-- So much love in your decisions. I'm inspired beyond rangoon, even as being inspired feels only like Tip of the Iceberg. May I come to do you justice. Antigone with a happy ending, Antigone in gold Doc Martens.... Yours ever in con-fraternity~~

I expected a eulogy of sorts--and I suppose it is that--but this is a gladsome birth announcement, one that excites me, even as it left me, I confess, very near tears.

You are braver than most of us, and, wonderfully, it does not seem a bravery born of desperation: where there might have been bitterness, you exude instead sweetness and light, and the promise of horizonless possibilities.

I am startled and saddened to see you go; I rejoice that you're not leaving!

I'm moved by *your move* toward a vision of confraternity and community that builds upon friendship. And I'm tickled by the varied responses to this posting over social media. If my may collate adjectives from my own online community, this posting -- and this decision -- is at once "inspiring," "scary," "brave," "infinitely beautiful," "amazing," and "keep[ing] it real."

Keep us posted, Eileen. We all want to know where things will go from here...

Though have never met and likely never shall, you have become one of my heroes. "Brave" "intrepid" "inspirational" do not sufficiently describe your action. Thank you for reminding all of us that "resignation" is an act of victory, not an admission of defeat!

A few years ago, when I was at a different school and somewhat dissatisfied with they way that my colleagues there seemed to have no idea who I was or what I did, or why it might matter, a friend said, "Yeah, but that's your job, not your career." I had thought those two were the same thing, I suppose, until he pointed out the division. And he was right. I go to conference to see all the people who are part of my career, of which my teaching at a college is a part [admittedly,the part that pays the bills], but just a part. Eileen, you may have left your job, but I doubt if we will *let* you leave your career! Lead on, Captain, lead on, and when you form the new university in the ruins of an abandoned factory in Detroit, or on an uncharted coral atol in the South Seas, let me -- let us -- know.

I've lurked for a while, finding myself here between attempts to read for exams, or (in this case) unknot the net of my dissertation. Too occasional a visitor to feel like I could contribute, I've nonetheless valued your and others' contributions to what seems like the future, or to translate through utopia, to what ought to be now for us.

I like the connection between friendship, community, scholarship, and self, and I'm glad that you have recognized for yourself when to step beyond the bounds of an institution that doesn't serve those needs.

This is the realest thing I've read in a long time. Thank you for sharing your processes of de-materialization. You'd make a believer out of the most dejected schmuck, just think of what you do for the semi-inspired!

Thanks for this beautiful post, Eileen. My favorite part is the account of your precious possessions at the old house -- the urn of ashes, the photograph, the Beowulf first-editions, the Waterford crystal glasses.... I was thinking about the contents of this catalogue on my run today, which in turn conjured up thoughts about *ubi sunt* poems and the realization of how glib had been my own readings of that medieval genre. Cuz I had been thinking, oh ubi-sunt poets, listen to how you're going on and on about these great material things: hate to tell you but the material world is what you're all about! But your serious practice of de-materialization recalls to me the full force of gestures of renunciation and relinquishing and transformation, and I was thinking as I ran about the difference between touching cherished things and the memory of having touched them and trying to make sense of how, if at all, that difference matters....

Eileen, though I think we've only met in person once or twice, your presence in my online networks and your championing of all things wonderful (in the early modern sense of the word!) -- as well as your support of my own strange digital work -- has been and will continue to be a huge inspiration to me. For a letter with so much pessimism about academia, this has given me more hope than I've felt in a long time. Looking forward to what you stir up next.

Thank you so much for everything you've said here -- for providing such a raw and honest example of courageous living. I wish you the absolute best as you move forward and, even though I've never had the good fortune to meet you in person, I have no doubt that you will blaze a trail of light wherever you go!

what could I tell you about how architects desperately/passionately want relationships (spatial) to work,while knowing that it is rather the liberating suggestions that space makes, that which they pursue.

We have a very nice large 'insomnia' couch, firm and smooth - and two cats that fake love all night with whomever's wanderlust. In my good moments, I personally call it 'oasis' - though it is clearly not a space but a fragment of time that often bleeds out.

Brave yes, but I would rather say foolish. Foolish in the Morean and utopian sense that we all need fools to dream with but few of us can bring ourselves to shed enough skins to be truly, brilliantly, beautifully and creatively foolish.

Which when his father saw, he knew well enough that they had left him without giving him anything to eat, and therefore commanded that he should be loosed from the said chains, by the counsel of the princes and lords there present : besides that, also the physicians of Gargantua said, that if they did thus keep him in the cradle, he would be all his lifetime subject to the stone. When he was unchained, they made him to sit down, where, after he had fed very well, he took his cradle, and broke it into more than five hundred thousand pieces, with one blow of his fist that he struck in the midst of it, swearing that he would never come into it again.

My initial thoughts here are hopelessly self-centered, I think: I am struck by how my entire journey so far, since I left the military and decided to do the grad school thing, can without much strain be organized as an imaginary, often asynchronous conversation with you and your work (and I mean work in a sense much broader than that captured by the CV and publisher's proof and syllabus) - a conversation that a few times spilled over into the corporeal and synchronous. It's not all Old English studies either (though I'm feeling way too vulnerable both professionally and personally these days to elaborate on that in any way that is associated with my real name in "public"). But what it amounts to is that there have been quite a few times when I felt painted into a corner and desperately needed something I couldn't name or identify in order to be able to piece together (or, usually, invent) the tools to move with any sense of agency, to do anything with my self or my life or my work that was genuine action rather than simply (often delayed, generally ineffectual, and not infrequently soul-killing) *re*action. It's still a struggle, and the last few months have been pretty low, and today perhaps the lowest in a good while, and this isn't what I expected to read when I clicked the link, but I think it was -- once again -- just what I needed. So, from a purely selfish spot, let me say thanks (again).

From a less self-centered perspective, let me say "wow," and "good luck," and there's always a sofa in Atlanta (or wherever I end up) should you need it in your journeys.

A quick note to say that I am emotionally overwhelmed, but in a good way, by the responses to my post, and "resignation" [that isn't really a resignation]. The generosity of these responses, and also private messages I have received, tells me this: we can, and will, do anything. Things will get better, and we'll get the university, and public intellectual commons [at least] that we want and deserve. More soon.

I've been stewing on this, Eileen, and talking about it with colleagues here, and just don't know what to say but "congratulations" and, in the voice of Leslie Nielson from _Airplane_, "Good luck! We're all counting on you!" (as the plane goes down in flames). Every time I talk to a student about graduate school and the Academic Life, I stress the importance of having one foot firmly planted in a life outside of the Academy. On a practical level, have an escape plan; on an emotional level, be prepared for abuse; and on a personal level, know who you are independent of the "job." Your "resignation" inspires--I've already had several colleagues here nod in jealousy and approval. Show us a new path. What rats might follow? (Are we in a Pied Piper analogy or a sinking ship analogy?). Best,Ashby

Bravely spoken and bravely done, Eileen! In my darker moments in academe I fantasise about quitting and starting a new political party that actually visibly cared about people, in the vague hope of fixing, making better somehow, and of paying back all the kindness I've received that I haven't been able to spend to my or many other people's benefit. You may have hit on a larger and more beautiful way to answer that call. I hope so. Until I do quit the game, though, or even after subject to housing etc., please know that should you need to be near where I am the spare bed or sofa can be yours. We will argue the crap out of things, obviously, but then there is such a lot of it to argue out... All luck and best wishes for the journey ahead!

One of the things I like best about you is that you manage to do what is best for yourself, best for the people you care about, and best for the structural and institutional ways that will make good things happen. Also, you allow your journeys to inspire the journeys of others who may be wildly different than yours. Description and resonance is all; prescription and identity are illusory. Love to you on the next phase.

Eileen Joy, I do not think I know you personally, though I know your name and it is possible that we have met several times at conferences. If we have, forgive me my awful memory. Your post brings back to me the feelings I had when I resigned my tenure-line job (about two hours west of SIUE) without another job lined up. That was in 2006. Best move I ever made. May it be so for you, too!